Registering non-citizens to vote

Abdel showed up at his local Pennsylvania motor vehicle office to take his drivers license test  and walked out having registered to vote, even though he is not a citizen.

He said his command of English isnt good and the computer system was unclear, but he somehow managed to sign up even though he knew he shouldnt.

Then there was Angelo, who figured he could vote because he joined the U.S. military, even though he wasnt a citizen. He, too, signed up at the Pennsylvania motor vehicle bureau and registered as a Democrat. He then voted nearly every year from 2001 through 2014.

He finally wrote to Allegheny County asking to be stricken from the rolls, saying he had been ineligible all along.

Angelo and Abdel are some of the more than 130 people the county has nixed from its voter lists in recent years after discovering they werent U.S. citizens and should never have been allowed to register, much less vote, according to a report being released Thursday from the Public Interest Legal Foundation.

Making it as easy as possible to register and vote even if you aren't allowed to has long been the Democrat strategy. How many does that add up to? According to this article, up to 100,000 illegitimate voters on the rolls, just in Pennsylvania.

California sued over broken gun registry by gun rights groups

Four gun-rights groups sued the state of California on Wednesday over the failed implementation of an online registration system they claim has left certain gun owners unable to comply with the state's new assault weapons restrictions through no fault of their own.

The Second Amendment Foundation, the Calguns Foundation, the Firearms Policy Coalition, and the Firearms Policy Foundation filed suit alongside three California citizens against the California Department of Justice and Attorney General Xavier Becerra. They claim that California's online gun registration system, the California Firearms Application Reporting System, has not worked properly since its inception and did not work at all in the lead up to the registration deadline set for certain rifles. Further, they claim that the state was aware of the problems with the system.

Putting people in jail for being unable to comply with a law because the government screwed up their website seems like a violation of due process, on top of the 2nd Amendment issues.

Bombs found in raid on Antifa activist

Authorities have arrested a 43-year-old man after they located explosive devices and firearms at his residence while serving a search warrant in connection with multiple area burglaries.

While serving the search warrant, detectives found what they say were bomb making materials and chemicals. The Sioux Falls Police bomb squad were called to the residence and authorities evacuated the surrounding area.

Authorities say they found multiple explosive devices as well as ammonium nitrate and aluminum powder, which authorities say have no use other than for an explosive device.

Authorities also seized multiple firearms and a homemade firearm silencer from the residence.

Authorities say they found multiple items related to Antifa, an anti-fascist militant group, as well as other items indicating an extreme hatred for law enforcement and government.

Antifa appears to be a terrorist group, and bears a striking resemblance to the behavior of the historical brownshirts.

A Different Justice

Manafort, who was briefly President Donald Trumps campaign chairman, is awaiting trial on charges pertaining to bank fraud and his failure to register as a foreign agent, among others.

In other words, for a near-identical crime, Bill and Hillarys friend could escape and emerge completely unscathed, while Paul Manafort may rot in jail, Carlson said. Only one of them made the mistake of chairing Donald Trumps presidential campaign.Advertisement

Schweizer, who wrote Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, noted that Podesta Group founder Tony Podesta also failed to register as a foreign agent under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) for his lobbying work with a Ukrainian group.

The differential treatment of people linked to Clinton versus people linked to Trump is destroying the legitimacy of Mueller's prosecutions.

At the link, Sebastian makes the important point that these states are not enforcing the law. There is no law that makes it illegal to publish firearms designs on the internet at the state level. The company that posted them had just settled with the federal agencies charged with enforcing the export laws (the only ones relevant here for publishing gun designs) because those laws likely violate the First Amendment and the government was afraid to press the case and get a ruling to that effect. .

Trump threatens shutdown over wall funding

President Trump says he will shut down the federal government if the Republicans and Democrats in Congress do not deliver border wall funding and an end to the Catch and Release loophole system in their latest funding bill.

Looks like Trump has learned from what happened last time and is starting his demands (and/or negotiations) early rather than get shallacked at the last second with a spending bill he can't change.

More on the impeachment articles filed against Rosenstein

Nonetheless, Freedom Caucus Chairman Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) went forward with the articles of impeachment. The lawmakers charged Rosenstein with high crimes and misdemeanors and noted that Rosenstein signed off on a search warrant that deliberately withheld vital information from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). The DOJ under Rosensten was withholding embarrassing documents and information, knowingly hiding investigative information from Congress, committing various abuses of the FISA process and refusing to comply with subpoenas, according to the lawmakers. The articles were filed just before the House goes on its five-week August recess and are not expected to come up for a vote until the members return to Washington, congressional officials said.

Mr. Rosenstein oversaw the potentially improper authorization of FISA searches and electronic surveillance of members of the Trump campaign, states Article 5 of the impeachment document. As evidenced by the July 21, 2018 release of the Carter Page FISA application, under Mr. Rosensteins supervision, the dossier compiled by Christopher Steele on behalf of the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign formed a material part of the FISA application. Under Mr. Rosensteins supervision, the Department of Justice and FBI intentionally obfuscated the fact the dossier was originally a political opposition research document before the FISC.

Meadows made the decision to file the impeachment articles late Wednesday after a meeting with DOJ and FBI officials. According to Meadows the DOJ was not willing to comply with months of requests, instead, the officials argued they were in compliance with Congress.

Rosenstein's behavior definitely deserves impeachment. Threatening to subpoena emails from Congressional staffers in retaliation for their document requests is just the cherry on the top of his involvement in the Mueller appointment, the FISA warrant approvals, and likely quite a bit more we just don't know yet.

Whatever happened to the unmasking investigation?

Every day brings new stories about Russian interference in the 2016 election, whether Donald Trump played a role, and alleged abuses by our intelligence agencies.

One of the deepest, darkest, most important issues in the whole mess has to do with the massive number of unmaskings of U.S. citizens. It potentially opens a can of worms squirmier than many other issues.

I've been wondering this myself. Did people lose track of this aspect of the investigation? When Susan Rice denied asking for people to be unmasked despite the records showing that she may many such requests, did that not set off red flags for abuse and internal audits?

About the violence inherent in the system...

Preservation order for Comey's private emails sought

The Daily Caller News Foundation and Judicial Watch asked a federal judge Thursday to order the Department of Justice to preserve all of former FBI Director James Comeys personal emails that were related to two Freedom of Information Act requests.

Both groups filed their motion before U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia Colleen Judge Kollar-Kotelly, who was nominated by former President Ronald Reagan.

This is one of those things that is likely closing the barn door after the horses get out. If Comey had anything incriminating in those emails, that he recognized as incriminating (since he may well be blinded by his own moral arrogance), he has likely already deleted them. But we absolutely should check anyway.

Judge orders Fusion GPS to answer questions about dossier

Representatives of Fusion GPS must answer a broad array of questions about the opposition research firms role in creating, investigating and disseminating the infamous Steele dossier, a federal judge ruled.

U.S. District Court Judge Ursula Ungaro issued the decision Tuesday in a defamation lawsuit a Russian tech executive filed against BuzzFeed News, which published the dossier on Jan. 10, 2017.

The trial is scheduled to begin in Miami in November.

You might expect that the trial date means we won't see any revelations about this before the midterm elections. But depositions usually happen before trial, likely well before trial as the lawyers need to prepare based on them. It seems likely we'll see leaks in October.

Vigin Islands' governor issued emergency firearms confiscation order?

Two House committees are investigating Virgin Islands Gov. Kenneth Mapps emergency order allowing national guardsmen to confiscate legally-owned firearms ahead of Hurricane Irma in 2017.

Republican Reps. Rob Bishop of Utah and Bob Goodlatte of Virginia sent a letter to Mapp on Wednesday, asking for documentation on the order and whether or not any firearms were actually seized under the emergency order.

Both lawmakers worried Mapps order could violate Americans Second Amendment right to bear arms.

It sounds like a slam-dunk violation of the 2nd Amendment if any firearms were actually confiscated. If it was just boilerplate language that was never executed, it's still a violation, but the real world effects are likely to be minimal since no one would have standing to challenge it.

I suspect this behavior is actually a remnant of the past when it actually was politically helpful. Nowadays the ability to record, publish, and prove the violence makes it unhelpful. But in the past, if you could shut down a speaker with violence, threats, and intimidation... there was no way to prove it. There was no news.

Clapper: Obama was behind the whole thing

"If it weren't for President Obama, we might not have done the intelligence community assessment that we did, that set off a whole sequence of events which are still unfolding today, notably special counsel Mueller's investigation. President Obama is responsible for that and it was he who tasked us to do that intelligence assessment in the first place."

We now have Clapper and Strzok who are both saying that either the White House, or Obama specifically, set in motion the intelligence operations against the Trump campaign and was kept informed the whole time. Indeed, in Strzok's words, "the White House is running this."

And Obama probably still is.

America has already proven more resistant to his flavor of tin-man dictatorship than the third-world countries he grew up in, but final victory remains to be seen. Will Obama lead the Deep State in successfully removing Trump, or at least protecting the corrupt elements from facing consequences? Or will justice prevail in the end?

How the Youtube video selection algorithm works...

Over at the Gun Free Zone, one of the authors reports on a selection of videos delivered via autoplay and youtube's suggested video algorithm. I think there's a simple way to explain this. I think YouTube's algorithm attempts to detect people with stereotypically right-wing beliefs -- such as opposition to gun control -- and is determined to feed them propaganda until they are appropriately reeducated.

Obama knowingly funded terrorists

A new report released on Wednesday revealed that the Obama administration knowingly provided an Islamic terrorist-financing organization with hundreds of thousands of dollars despite the fact that the group had been designated as a terrorist-financing organization for a decade by the U.S. government.

Obama officials approved the release of well over $100,000 even after they were informed that the Khartoum-based Islamic Relief Agency (ISRA) was affiliated with Osama bin Laden and Maktab al-Khidamat (MK), which eventually became al-Qaeda.

ISRA, also referred to as the Islamic African Relief Agency (IARA), received a $200,000 taxpayer-funded grant from the Obama administration, which released at least $115,000 to the terrorist-financing organization.

It's small dollars by government standards, but he was warned about who he was funding, and he did it anyway.

IG Horowitz is a coverup artist

Gohmert asked Strzok about his meeting in 2016 with Frank Rucker and Janette McMillan, an investigator and lawyer, respectively, for then-Intelligence Community Inspector General Chuck McCullough (an Obama appointee).

McCullough sent them to see Strzok, who was the FBIs deputy assistant director for the Counterintelligence Division, to brief him and three other FBI personnel about an anomaly that their forensic analysis had found in Clintons server.

According to Gohmert, the inspector general discovered that, with four exceptions, every single one of Clintons emailsmore than 30,000were going to an address that was not on the distribution list.

In other words, according to the information Gohmert received from the intelligence inspector general, something was causing Clintons server to send copies of all of her email communications outside of the country to an unauthorized source that was a foreign entity unrelated to Russia.

One of the other disturbing bits of information that came out of this exchange was that, according to Gohmert, the Office of the Intelligence Community Inspector General called Michael Horowitz, the inspector general of the Department of Justice, four times because it wanted to brief Horowitz about this forensic analysis and this security breach. But, according to Gohmert, Horowitz never returned the call.

The fact that Horowitz refused to take calls on this casts his entire report into doubt. His job wasn't to fix the problems, it was yet another modified limited hangout. Drop the information already known, but keep the remedies in-house and out of course by refusing to admit to bias actually influencing anything even in the face of overwhelming evidence.

Florida CEO of domestic violence charity makes $761K per year

Tiffany Carr runs the states top domestic violence organization, a nonprofit that uses public money  state and federal  to finance shelters and other essential services. And she makes a good living.

How good? In a June 30, 2017 report, the Florida Coalition Against Domestic Violence disclosed she is paid $761,560 annually, a salary that is approved by its board. She hit that mark after receiving pay raises totaling $313,475 over a two-year period.

Thats  its ridiculous, said Dan Ravicher, a professor at University of Miami School of Law who focuses on nonprofits, business and social entrepreneurship. Were talking almost 2 percent of the budget being paid to one person. Thats pretty unusual.

Mueller now scrutinizing Trump's tweets

The New York Times reports that special counsel Robert Mueller is scrutinizing tweets and negative statements from the president about Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the former FBI director James B. Comey. Mr. Mueller wants to question the president about the tweets, a line in the New York Times reads.

Well, this is news

Two retired colonels say former Secretary of State and failed 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton should have had her security clearance pulled.One, retired Col. James Williamson, was surprised Clinton was not included in the White Houses announcement that it was considering revoking six former national security officials security clearances.The colonels organization, OPSEC, twice asked then-Secretary of State John Kerry in 2015 to suspend the security clearances of Hillary Clinton and her aides, Cheryl Mills, Huma Abedin, and Jacob Sullivan.

I'm surprised Clinton still holds a clearance. Entirely aside from her email fiasco, which would be grounds to revoke it, she hasn't held an official government position since 2013 when she stepped down as Secretary of State. As a presidential candidate she might have been given a clearance but she lost. These things should expire in a reasonable time period, and five years since 2013 is more than enough time for a clearance to expire.